


it's too quiet in this room

by orphan_account



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23842492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Kevin was like all of them — nothing special. The only thing special about him? One day, he was gone.He didn't come back.
Kudos: 4





	it's too quiet in this room

Kevin was the first who didn’t come back.

At least, he was the first Meg noticed. Their faces all tended to run together, the other survivors who appeared time and time again at the campfire. Some she saw only once. Some she recognized only by their clothes. Some, like her, were persistent enough to earn their names: Dwight, the dorky, franchise-manager-looking guy with the surprisingly deep voice and a shy but intense way of handling himself. Nea, a hard-faced graffiti artist who largely kept to herself, but whose experience in evasion and freerunning had saved Meg’s skin more than once by serving as a distraction.

With a flop of brown hair and a soft jawline, Kevin hadn’t been anything special. He wore a letterman’s jacket, talked about being on his way home from football practice. He had watery eyes the color of mud and snorted when he laughed — which understandably wasn’t often, but he seemed better able to see the humor in things than most. Meg didn’t know how he managed it, but he’d made her smile a few times.

Time got to him. It got to all of them, even the happy-go-luckiest. And even the ones who seemed genuinely to be enjoying themselves, or the challenge, or something about the endless cycle of survival, escape, death, and return, grew harder. Or, if they didn’t, they accepted it into them like it was a part of their identity, which was something Meg couldn’t stomach. She felt sick with every match that saw her partnered with Bill Overbeck and — secretly, shamefully — felt relieved whenever he was being hunted or hooked instead of her. He’d given himself fully over to the Entity and its schemes and it made him ugly to be around. Uncomfortable. A reminder of the torture that shot through all of them like a fever.

Meg refused to let it take her that way. No matter how many times she felt the brutal impact of the Huntress’s axes, the scrape of metal on her bones if she stumbled into a trap, felt her neck snap as the ground turned the brilliant orange of lava flows, the dark tolls chiming as time ran out…

No, that would never be her.

The last time she’d seen Kevin, they’d both been run ragged around Coldwind Farm, were both bleeding and sore from injury and exhaustion. He was sweating and pale and he shivered as he crouched next to her, reworking the gears and slipped belts inside a generator, wincing when his fingers were pinched in the metal or lacerated by a broken screw. Meg was favoring her left leg, each step since her last trap feeling very, very wrong, like her weight could only be rocked onto it, like the impact of running might shatter it, a poorly felled tree barber-chairing and shearing off.

They popped the generator together. When Meg looked up to motion Kevin along, to urge him to follow, he was already sprinting away from the chugging pistons and bright lights. Meg’s stomach clenched. Running nearly always drew more attention; she didn’t dare chase after him, and in point of fact wasn’t even sure that she could. And if she could, she doubted her ability to catch up to him, hampered as she was.

She had swallowed a wave of nausea as she moved off the generator, keeping low, her eyes scanning the corn for movement as she passed into the field, the thickness of the sharp dry stalks impeding her own vision as much as the killer's, making small scratches on her exposed skin.

Some time later — thirty seconds? Two minutes? — she’d heard him scream. Then nothing.

Some time later than that — the chittering, hollow sound of the Entity claiming another sacrifice rung out across the yard.

Meg had given up on the generators then. She loped as fast as she dared, listening for the soft, beckoning sound of the black fog that seeped openly from the escape hatch provided only in the most dire of circumstances. At first she’d been skeptical of the damned thing. Now, she threw herself in with abandon every time, on sight, knowing the cold dark of whatever was beneath meant survival, escape, an end to the grueling trial.

The campfire was still crackling brightly when she found herself there again, opening eyes she didn’t realize she had closed. She reached down to check her leg, squeezed tentatively, then firmer. The pain lingered, but as always, the injuries were gone, as if they’d never been there. She knew about phantom limb syndrome, the sensation of a ghostly arm or leg where there wasn’t one. Did that apply when the limb wasn’t actually gone?

Meg sat on one of the fallen logs. She loosened a braid, combed out her hair, and replaited it.

Other survivors came and went. She asked each one if they’d seen Kevin; each time, the answer was no.

She’d never heard of anyone escaping the Entity. Most people entertained the idea, at least at first. Some spent their trials looking for anything they’d missed. A new passageway, a gap in the fence that closed them in, a door or a window or something as small as a crawlspace. Enough time here, though, wherever “here” was, and they’d stop looking in the end. They always did. Meg certainly had, and not for lack of wanting. But there was never anything new, and poking about tended to run you directly into one of the hunters.

“No thanks, get off my dick,” as Nea sometimes said.

Meg was pretty sure she was a lesbian.

In any case, Kevin was well and truly gone. And while it was nice to think that somehow, one of them had outsmarted a seemingly all-powerful being beyond comprehension, the truth, Meg felt, was more likely to be that he had simply failed some test of will, given up, or been found unworthy. She wasn’t sure what the criteria were — she never was, not even for what passed for a “normal” match — but whatever came after this cyclical existence, she was in no hurry to see for herself.

After all, Kevin may have been the first.

He certainly wasn’t the last.

**Author's Note:**

> i found one tiny entry on the wiki that mentioned "the void" as a realm where survivors go when their spirit has been too greatly broken to continue fighting for survival. i couldn't get the first line out of my head, so i got this drabble out instead. enjoy!


End file.
